Helpful Tools to Generate Link Bait Ideas
Posted by Charles on March 12th, 2010
I’d say that creating successful link bait is the hardest part of online marketing. Unless you’re blessed with the good fortune of having a cutting-edge product or ground-breaking service then it requires a lot more work to stand out from the crowd.
Running a successful link bait campaign requires researching ideas, identifying a focus, creating the content, and then seeding and promoting the content.
However, what does make the job much easier is actually having an idea which is worthy of the term ‘link bait’. This is where these three tools and techniques come in:
The Link Bait Generator
How useful would it be to have a tool which generates an unlimited number of great headlines, making ideal link bait? That’s exactly what the Link Bait Generator does.
It doesn’t work every time but it certainly gets the ideas flowing and comes up with some surprisingly good suggestions based on the keywords you enter.
For example, let’s say you’re looking to generate a compelling article for a marketing site you own. After just 20 seconds playing around with the Link Bait Generator it’ll come up with some suggestions which have quite a bit of potential:
- 5 Insane But True Things About Marketing
- 10 Funny Ways Marketing Has Appeared in Music Videos
- 9 Crazy Ways That Marketing Is Infiltrating Pop Culture
(I came across this tool thanks to the SEOBook Training Programme – if you can afford the $300 monthly fee then I highly recommend it).
Keyword Questions Tool
We’ve mentioned this tool before in our Keyword Research post. Keyword Questions is useful for general articles but also comes in handy when looking to craft link bait.
If you know that people are asking certain questions online and can create the best content available to answer their questions then you’re halfway there.
Taking the marketing example earlier, here are a few popular questions that people are asking online:
- How Marketing Affects Society
- How Effective is Guerilla Marketing
- What is Grassroots Marketing
Without being adapted the questions above probably aren’t suitable to become viral link bait pieces, but with a little adjusting there’s a lot of potential there. For example, create headlines like ‘10 Ways That Marketing Has Negatively Affected Society’ or ‘3 Real-Life Examples of the Most Effective Guerilla Marketing Campaigns’.
Tapping into Digg
Whenever you read about how to be successful in social media one recurring piece of advice always comes up. See what’s gone popular in the past.
Digg now has a great search tool where you can search for popular articles based on one or more keywords, and then filter the results according to the number of Diggs, topic and age.
Take Guerilla Marketing that we mentioned earlier and you can quickly see the type of article that has gone viral:
- Guerilla Marketing: 22 Ads from Bizarre to Brilliant
- 5 Examples of Guerilla Marketing Gone Wrong
- 12 Guerilla Marketing Stunts That Actually Worked
Finally, for an excellent article about creating and promoting link bait take a look at this real-life case study.
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